PHILADELPHIA — Pick your cliche. Wanna go peaks and valleys? Roller coaster? We can keep it simple and say up and down. Whatever literary method you’d like to use to describe Gerrit Cole’s performance this season, have at it.
There was a rocky opening day, followed by eight good to excellent starts, then the four bad ones, then three more great ones, and then Thursday: 51/3 innings, 10 hits, seven runs.
In those three good ones, he stranded 100, 100 and 83.3 percent of baserunners. Thursday: 47.2. He allowed more line drives Thursday, though the hard contact was about the same; half of the balls put in play went for hits, which won’t happen to Cole all that often.